Categories
Stripe Tutorials

How to Accept Alipay Payments through Stripe – A Guide

Operated by the Ant Financial Services Group, Alipay is China’s most preferred payment method. Functioning as a digital wallet, it has become a popular platform, earning over one billion active users worldwide since its inception. Its growth isn’t stopping anytime soon, especially since various corners of the world house Chinese immigrants, all of which continue to use Alipay as their main mode of digital transactions. 

Seeing as it has reached global success, Alipay also is also used by eCommerce merchants and other marketplaces, along with on-demand services. It accepts a wide variety of currencies, including USD, EUR, CAD, and AUD, among others. 

Alipay users are allowed to pay via their mobile phones or on the web, via a secure method that requires their login credentials. Funds used to pay for goods and services are withdrawn from their bank accounts or Alipay accounts, ensuring hassle-free and secure payments. 

If you plan to target Chinese consumers, hosting Alipay is the best route to go. Supported through Stripe, you’ll be able to gain the trust of Chinese customers from all over the world. Seeing as these prospects are lovers of online shopping, your business venture should be enjoying growth and prosperity. To successfully offer Alipay for your future Chinese customers, here’s a quick guide for you.

How Alipay Works 

For on-demand service and mobile payments: 

Step 1: Once your customer is ready to pay for the items on their cart, they will be redirected to the payment gateway where they will be free to choose Alipay as their payment method.

Step 2: They will be then redirected to Alipay’s secure platform, where a QR code will need to be scanned. This will then enter the code from the mobile phone, prompting it to redirect onto another secure page.

Step 3: The customer will receive a message notifying them that the payment has been successful. Depending on your website’s mechanism, the customer will be directed back to your site for further browsing.

For web page payment: 

Step 1: Upon checkout, customers will be allowed to choose Alipay as their preferred method of payment.

Step 2: They will be redirected onto a secure page, where they will be required to input credentials for verification. 

Step 3: Once credentials are successfully inputted, the customer will be notified that their payment has been successful. 

How do I deal with disputed payments and refunds?

Given Alipay’s secure nature and authentication methods, there is little to no risk of fraud or unrecognized payments. Your Stripe account will remain untouched, especially since chargebacks cannot happen. However, Alipay users will be promoted by Alipay to directly contact you—should any issues arise, you will be given the option to contact your customers directly. 

Refunds, on the other hand, are allowed up to 90 days after the payment. Refunds only take 5 minutes to complete, and Stripe keeps you posted about the refund status. Should the refund process pay, however, you will be compelled to look for alternative options to transact with your customer. 

The Magic of A Payment Page Builder 

As the world progresses further into the digital age, customers continuously look for ways to make their lives easier and more convenient. As such, it’s only logical that they choose merchants that offer them the very same notion. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, your competitive advantage will come from your customers. You need to make them choose you, and one of the best ways to do that is by offering them the best payment methods possible.

For a hosted payment page you can trust, Payment Page is the place to go. We offer you payment options that help diversify your business, ensuring that you remain competitive and growing even in a tough market. Through our specially designed WordPress plug-in, you can now offer credible and secure options for every customer you wish to pursue. Reach out to us now for more information!

Categories
eCommerce

3 Payment Systems for Companies Tapping the Chinese Market

Ever since China opened its doors to global trade and embraced the open market economy, a lot of countries have taken notice. Doing business with one of the world’s biggest sources of manpower, raw materials, and industrial goods is an advantage that businesses of all kinds cannot ignore.

For people who want to tap into the Chinese market, it can be challenging to set up a system for receiving payments from Chinese customers. If your company does not want to spend resources building a brick-and-mortar store and handling expansion into the Chinese market in the traditional manner, e-commerce is the way to go.

Why you should expand into Chinese e-Commerce

E-commerce revenues in China are expected to grow to $1.3 billion by 2024, driven by a wide range of industries but most notably in fashion, electronics, and hobbies or DIY. Presently, the average revenue per person in this 893.8 million-strong user base is $1,121.04, which can be expected to reasonably increase in the coming years.

This resilience of the Chinese market combined with the convenience of online shopping makes e-commerce ventures in the country an attractive prospect for many business owners. For companies to succeed, though, they must adapt to local preferences and habits. This includes delivering services through channels familiar to the Chinese market.

Online Payments in China

PayPal and other payment methods are not as widely-used in China. Local consumers prefer Chinese payment systems, as these accept transactions offline or through QR codes. Successfully running a business in China is often tied with providing an option for payment through one of the three biggest providers in the country; Alipay, WeChat Pay, and China UnionPay (CUP, or just UnionPay).

Ideally, integrating with all three systems is the best route for a business. This way you can have access to nearly 100 percent of the shoppers in the country.

WeChat Pay

In 2019, since introducing services in 49 countries and support for 16 currencies, the number of cross-border payments using WeChat Pay has increased significantly in China. WeChat Pay has solidified itself as a popular Chinese payment platform. This is true even though it is the youngest of the top mobile payment options, demand is only increasing.

WeChat Pay’s dominance is due to the fact that almost everyone in the country has a WeChat account, which serves as a multipurpose online network for Chinese people. Through WeChat, users can send messages privately, connect with friends, play games, pay bills, get delivery, buy transportation tickets of all kinds, and much more. Needless to say, if you live in China, WeChat is a big part of people’s everyday lives.

Businesses that want to enter the Chinese market integrate with WeChat Pay because of its wide reach. Accounts on WeChat come automatically integrated with the payment platform, which only needs to be connected to a local Chinese bank account to enable financial transactions. This platform is also supported by all devices that work with the WeChat Pay app.

Setting up WeChat Pay directly on your website is not easy, which is why Stripe has created a partnership for most global businesses to be able to accept WeChat Pay on their websites. Using your Stripe account and the Payment Page plugin, you’ll be able to get started with WeChat Pay accounts without needing an actual account or relationship with WeChat directly, making it much easier.

If you have a WeChat Official Account, which is only available if you’ve registered your business in China, you can accept payments on your website directly through their API integration, bypassing Stripe. But this type of integration is difficult to achieve because many businesses find the regulations of creating a business entity in China too burdensome. Now, eCommerce sites don’t have to have the direct relationship with WeChat and go through all the requirements of creating a business in China.

Alipay

Though WeChat has a large consumer base and many applications in day to day life, Alipay rivals its capacity to deliver payments. This is because, as the pioneer, Alipay remains the ubiquitous name in electronic payments in China after gaining popularity as a payment solution for the eCommerce platform Alibaba.

Alipay now provides support for online and offline payment, as well as the option to settle bills and utilities. They are similar to WeChat in that they only charge fees to customers for withdrawals, and they charge similar merchant fees.

Alipay is similar to WeChat in that to accept it on your website, you’ll need a direct relationship with Alipay and a Chinese business license (unless you have a Stripe account or another gateway that has a direct relationship with Alipay).

Integrating with Stripe for both Alipay and WeChat Pay lets businesses target a large portion of the Chinese market at once because both payment systems combined dominate almost the entire market.

China UnionPay

The distinction of UnionPay is that it was established as a credit and debit card provider. This system is new to the online payment industry, but its pool of long-time clients include more than 160 banks, which issue more than five billion cards in China every year. Any person with an active bank account in the country can be considered a UnionPay customer.

What’s more, UnionPay supports a wider range of currencies and can operate in more countries. This is something its competitors are still working towards. UnionPay, because it fits the unique requirements of Chinese regulation, can offer these services easily compared to the other two platforms. This makes it a good choice for businesses that want to target countries other than China in their expansion, however, Stripe does not yet integrate with UnionPay, so you’ll need to work directly with them for a payment integration

Conclusion

Businesses that want to establish themselves in the Chinese online market should integrate with two of these three payment platforms at a minimum for eCommerce sales. Conducting research into how your products and services would best reach your target market is also necessary for this venture, like having translations and localizing your page.

Companies that want to enter the Chinese e-commerce market can partner with Payment Page to help handle their online sales in China. Our Stripe integration lets business owners place a payment form directly on their website or create a hosted payment page customized with their branding and product/service information, which serves as a channel for payments for WeChat Pay and Alipay. Get in touch to learn more.